May: Both Sides Now

Well, May was interesting! It was four weeks of almost non-stop significant things happening. May saw the completion of two things I have been working towards.

The first was a ten month play therapy certification.

I have spoken about Lisa Dion, founder of Synergetic Play Therapy (SPT), several times in my blogs. I completed the Intro course at the end of 2024 and launched into the Certification in August 2025. I loved it all. SPT has changed the way I do play therapy, upgraded my skills and helped me to bring in more structure to the "back end" of the work.

I can't say enough great things about SPT, how they facilitate the learning process and what they have to offer. Lisa always says the play therapist is the most important toy in the playroom. This means her trainings are focused on participants' self-awareness and growth even before skills and knowledge. It's a powerful paradigm to work and learn in. In a job that involves holding many emotions every single day, self-work really is the most important work.

So grateful for the SPT journey and everything in it, and that I get to continue growing in it for years to come.

The second thing that came to completion in May was my 8 Mile swim to raise funds for Singakwenza in the Oceans 8 Charity Swim. A wonderful event and a wonderful community of swimmers, I will keep going back to it because as much as it is great to raise funds for a very deserving charity, it gives me so much. You can watch the official video of the event here - the vibes!!! Take me back!!

My daughter and I went on a girls' camping trip, which we had wanted to do for ages. It was glorious soul food.

Oh! And May is also my birthday and that day was a really happy one for me!

The Other Side of Gratitude

In the SPT course, one of the things I learned is that we get to be grateful for everything. Not only the things that go well and that we can count as blessings in our lives, but also the things that are difficult.

As much as May had wonderful highlights for me, many other things happened (or didn't) that felt frustrating, disappointing and even heart-breaking. There was also sickness, sleeplessness, stress and anxiety, which, by the way threatened my participation in the completion of the things I am celebrating today! There were moments of utter exhaustion and needing to pull energy out of the bag for a fundraising meeting in the evening, or that last play therapy session of the day, or for cooking dinner.

During the SPT course, we wrote several letters of gratitude to ourselves in which we gave ourselves permission to thank ourselves within challenges we had faced or were facing.

Here, with humility and vulnerability is an excerpt from my gratitude letter to myself, written in our first retreat in SPT in August last year. (We had two time-intensive online learning retreats during the course and then regularly monthly classes online).

I am grateful for your willingness to start at ground zero again. To go with all that that may entail, feeling clunky, slow, de-skilled. I am so grateful for your heart to learn, your mind open to new and unfamiliar.

For every celebration and achievement there is challenge and differing levels of obstacles and difficulty. That simply is the process of getting to a goal. If it were easy we would all have achieved all our goals and be sitting around twiddling our thumbs. What if gratitude involves learning how to give thanks within the challenge? Challenges give us feedback about what to pay attention to.

We're now in June. What would a gratitude letter to yourself look like at this halfway point of the year? What are you grateful for in the blessings you've received? And what are you grateful for within the challenges? How have you seen yourself rising to the occasion? Or, even can you be grateful for when you just couldn't - what was the gift in that ultimately?

I am grateful for YOU. Thank you for being here. My blog is the thing that has suffered this month in all the hulabaloo, nasty and nice! I have missed you!